A free tool to help you increase the chance of success when submitting your apps to Apple’s Mac store has been released - but it's not in the App Store.

One reason apps are rejected by Apple is because they contain private APIs. Moreover, your app can be rejected even if you happen to accidentally name a method the same as one of the private APIs.Chimp studio's App Scanner is a utility that checks your iOS app for any of the private APIs that would result in it getting rejected by Apple.

It currently checks 24,000 signatures, and will also highlight any names that you’ve included that could cause problems because of similarities to private APIs. The method used is similar to the one Apple uses when you submit your app.

Ironically, App Scanner itself was rejected by Apple for ‘legal concerns’. The most likely reason behind the rejection is that if App Scanner appeared to be endorsed by appearing in the Mac store, developers would complain if apps that passed App Scanner were then rejected by Apple.

Developers were disappointed when Xcode 4 was released earlier this month as, despite a complete redesign, it still doesn’t include a scanner to check for private APIs.

"It is a bit disappointing that in the three years that the iOS software development kit has been available to third party developers, Apple hasn't provided any kind of pre-check tool," says App Scanner's developer Andrew Schenk.

App Scanner is free and can be downloaded from http://www.chimpstudios.com/appscanner. It comes with a sample iOP app and a command line interface so you can integrate it in scripts to make it easy to incorporate the check into your build process.